The Essential James A. Froude Collection. James A. Froude

wrong prevailing in the unenlightened age in which he lived. and who therefore demands all the toleration of our own enlarged humanity to allow him to remain there. Let us see how the following incident can be made to coincide with this hypothesis:--

      A few days after clearing the channel on his first great voyage, he fell in with a small Spanish ship, which he took for a prize. He committed the care of it to a certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was to follow him as a tender.

      In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second smaller ship was often indispensable to success; but many finely-intended enterprises were ruined by the cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again and again took advantage of darkness or heavy weather to make sail for England and forsake their commander. Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir Humfrey Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for his old friend has prevented him from leaving an exact account of his offence, we gather from the scattered hints which are let fall, that he, too, was meditating a similar piece of treason. However, it may or may not have been thus. But when at Port St Julien, "our General," says one of the crew,--

      "Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas Doughtie, and found them not to be such as he looked for, but tending rather to contention or mutiny, or some other disorder, whereby, without redresse, the success of the voyage might greatly have been hazarded. Whereupon the company was called together and made acquainted with the particulars of the cause, which were found, partly by Mr. Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence of the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although his private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the presence of us all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the care which he had of the state of the voyage, of the expectation of Her Majesty, and of the honour of his country, did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than the private respect of one man; so that the cause being thoroughly heard, and all things done in good order as near as might be to the course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr. Doughtie should receive punishment according to the quality of the offence. And he, seeing no remedy but patience for himself, desired before his death to receive the communion, which he did at the hands of Mr. Fletcher, our minister, and our General himself accompanied him in that holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution made ready, he, having embraced our General, and taken leave of all the company, with prayers for the Queen's Majesty and our realm, in quiet sort laid his head to the block, where he ended his life. This being done, our General made divers speeches to the whole company, persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our voyage, and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every man the next Sunday following to prepare himself to receive the communion, as Christian brethren and friends ought to do, which was done in very reverent sort, and so with good contentment every man went about his business."

      The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing from any comment which we might offer upon it. The crew of a common English ship organizing, of their own free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment hall more grand and awful than any most elaborate law court, with its ermine and black cap, and robes of ceremony for mind as well as body, is not to be reconciled with the pirate theory, which we may as well henceforth put away from us.

      Of such stuff were the early English navigators; we are reaping the magnificent harvest of their great heroism; and we may see once more in their history and in what has arisen out of it, that on these deep moral foundations, and on none others, enduring prosperities, of what kind so-ever, politic or religious, material or spiritual, are alone in this divinely-governed world permitted to base themselves and grow. Whereever we find them they are still the same. In the courts of Japan or of China, fighting Spaniards in the Pacific, or prisoners among the Algerines, founding colonies which by and by were to grow into enormous transatlantic republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the fierce latitudes of the Polar seas, they are the same indomitable God-fearing men whose life was one great liturgy. "The ice was strong, but God was stronger," says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come down and split them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of the ice rocks, and so saving themselves and it. Icebergs were strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and corsairs, and rocks, and reefs, which no chart had then noted-- they were all strong, but God was stronger, and that was all which they cared to know.